Ferhadija Mosque

Ferhad Pasha Sokolović, a member of the powerful Sokolović family that produced several Ottoman grand viziers, was appointed governor of the Bosnian sanjak in the 1570s and established his seat at Banja Luka. Around 1579 he endowed the mosque that bears his name, built in the classical Ottoman style: a square prayer hall crowned by a single dome on a high drum, with a porticoed entrance and a slender stone minaret. A hamam, a clock tower and a madrasa once stood around it, forming the commercial and religious core of the new town. The mosque survived the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian and Yugoslav periods largely intact and was listed as a cultural monument. On 7 May 1993 it was destroyed by explosives during the war, and the site was later turned into a parking lot. After the war a reconstruction campaign recovered thousands of original stone fragments, and the mosque was rebuilt to its 16th-century form, reopening in 2016.